Asus Strix R9 390X Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
Asus’ overclocked Strix version of the R9 390X mostly outpaces Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 running at stock speeds, and excels for 1440p gaming. But given the price, most buyers would be better off paying a little more for a GeForce GTX 980 or an AMD R9 Fury. Read More…

What We Liked…

8GB of memory

Mostly bests Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980

Runs quietly at out-of-the-box settings

What We Didn’t…

Not really powerful enough for high-detail 4K gaming

Essentially a higher-clocked 2013-era Radeon R9 290X

More power-hungry than competing Nvidia cards

Older 290X is arguably a better value at current prices

Asus Strix R9 390X Review

Table of Contents

Introduction

[Editors' Note: Be aware that pricing and features for video cards based on a given graphics chip can vary significantly, depending on the actual card maker. AMD and Nvidia make video "reference cards" based on their graphics processors, which they often send out for review. Third-party partners—MSI, Sapphire, EVGA, Asus, and many others—make and sell cards that often adhere closely to the design of these reference boards, as well as versions with slight differences in port configuration, the amount and speed of onboard memory, and the cooling fans or heat sinks installed. Be sure the specs and ports/connections on any "partner" board you're looking at are the same as what we've reviewed before making the purchase.]

For much of the last year or so, AMD has been quiet on the graphics-card front, steadily lowering prices on its existing 200-series cards. In that time, its biggest card introduction, before the summer of 2015, was to replace the Radeon R9 280 with the Radeon R9 285 in September of 2014.

AMD’s plan for taking on Nvidia at the high end revolves around the company’s new Fiji graphics processor, paired with a cutting-edge memory technology called “high-bandwidth memory” (HBM). The first of these Fiji-based cards to land on our test bench, the liquid-cooled AMD Radeon R9 Fury X, generally managed to keep pace with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti, if not substantively surpass it. An air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury (without an "X") card has been promised to start shipping in late July 2015 from AMD’s board partners (we’re currently testing an Asus Strix version of that card), along with a compact Radeon R9 Nano (a bit further out in 2015). Also on the horizon is an eventual dual-GPU Fiji-based card, which has been promised sometime in the fall.

In the meantime, for those PC gamers whose gaming aspirations aren’t yet aimed at 4K or play on multiple 1080p screens, AMD is also offering up a separate line of cards, dubbed the Radeon 300 series. They are not entirely new cards; the 300 series is based on graphics processors found in existing Radeon R7 and R9 200-series cards, with tweaks to the core clock speeds and memory, as well as the addition of more GDDR5 memory. (The cards go up to 8GB of onboard memory in the highest-end cards in the line, the Radeon R9 390 and 390X.)

AMD informed us that it would not be issuing reference cards for the 300 series (the usual way we first see a new card line), so any reviews of these cards would necessarily be of third-party partner boards. The clocking on each of these boards can vary depending on the aggressiveness of the card maker and its cooling solution, so performance can range a little bit within each GPU class. The first of the 300-series cards to land on our test bench from AMD's new line was the MSI-made R9 380 Gaming 4G, a $240 card with 4GB of graphics memory and the Twin Frozr V cooler we’ve seen on many upclocked MSI cards in the past. This card was aimed squarely at the midrange, for robust, detail-rich 1080p gaming or play at slightly higher resolutions (2,560x1,440 or 2,560x1,600).

Our second look at a 300-series card is decidedly more upscale. The Radeon R9 390X is based around the same “Hawaii XT” chip that debuted with the company’s Radeon R9 290X card in October of 2013. But AMD has tweaked the card to deliver higher clock speeds and paired it with an ample 8GB of memory—2GB more than even the $649 GeForce GTX 980 Ti offers.

Specifically, the Asus Strix R9 390X we’re looking at here has a base core clock of 1,070MHz, and 8GB of GDDR5 memory running on a wide 512-bit bus. And the card is cooled by the company’s DirectCU III cooler setup, which combines three “triple wing-blade fans,” dual 10mm heatpipes, and a metal backplate featuring the Strix owl logo.

It’s an impressive-looking and reasonably quiet card design—especially considering how noisy (and generally ineffective) the stock cooler was on the original R9 290X—but you’ll have to pay a little extra for this model. AMD’s projected MSRP for the Radeon R9 390X family as a whole is $429, and we were seeing R9 390X-based cards for sale at that price when we wrote this in early August 2015. (Examples: the MSI R9 390X Gaming 8G and Sapphire’s Tri-X R9 390X 8GB.) The Asus Strix R9 390X, in contrast, sports an MSRP that’s $40 higher.

At $469, the Strix R9 390X is nearly as expensive as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980, which was coming in reliably as low as $489 after a $20 mail-in rebate. And while the overclocked Strix R9 390X mostly bested the stock GeForce GTX 980 on our benchmarks, an overclocked version of that Nvidia card should deliver very similar performance, while sipping much less power than the 2013-era chip under the hood of the R9 390X.

If you’re ready, willing, and able to spend close to $500 on a gaming card, you’re already in deep, and we think most buyers would be better off opting for a cooler-running GeForce GTX 980-based card, or stepping up to a card based on AMD’s Radeon R9 Fury, which has more pixel-pushing power for 4K gaming, and a price tag that’s not all that more expensive, starting at $549.

Price changes, as the 300 series matures and settles into the market, may change that relative equation, making the R9 390X a better value. But at least in its Strix trim, while the R9 390X is a powerful and very satisfactory card in its own right for all-out gaming at anything short of 4K, in summer 2015 the competition is tough in this price slice of the card market.

Table of Contents

Asus Strix R9 390X

Our Verdict:
Asus’ overclocked Strix version of the R9 390X mostly outpaces Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 running at stock speeds, and excels for 1440p gaming. But given the price, most buyers would be better off paying a little more for a GeForce GTX 980 or an AMD R9 Fury.

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